Archive for the ‘tips’ Category

I shouldn’t need to write this post. But somehow, I think I do.

On July 18, in Gatineau, the city across the river from my city of Ottawa, someone recorded this:

So not surprisingly, this bus driver was quickly up for discipline.

It’s the job of the driver’s union to represent him. So, Local 591 of the Amalgamated Transit Union (French site) did so, with both his employer, and with the media.

The CBC story about the ATU response says:

“Felix Gendron, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Gatineau, said the driver’s privacy rights were violated after a passenger shot video of him and posted it on YouTube…’I think that the person who makes the video, if they don’t like the way the driver’s doing that they should go tell the driver. Not go put that on TV,’ said Gendron…Gendron said the union asked STO to ban passengers from being able to record drivers.” 

Here’s the part that I can’t believe I’m writing:

1. If you’re a bus driver responsible for the lives of dozens of riders and other motorists around you, don’t fill out paperwork while driving or steer the bus with your knees. 
2. If you get caught doing something that stupid, accept the fact that you were caught doing something that stupid. Focus on serving your customers (by not endangering their lives) rather than shoot the messenger. The person with the camera wasn’t the one in the wrong. 

Tony Cement demos a new Twitter app

While politics isn’t a huge part of my business life (unlike my compatriot Mark Blevis, for example), I am an armchair political quarterback of the first water. So this post by Maclean’s magazine parliamentary correspondent and blogger Aaron Wherry really caught my eye.

Minister of Industry Tony Clement is possibly the most passionate user of Twitter within Canada’s federal cabinet (although there are others.) And he should be given credit for not cutting and running despite being in charge of some controversial files, including changes to Canada’s census, an attempted takeover of Potash Corporation by Australian firm BHP Billiton, and most recently the government’s awarding of $300 million to Pratt & Whitney Canada to assist the company in carrying out research & development on new aircraft engines.

The announcement of this funding led to some stiff media criticism, and last night, as Wherry illustrates, Minister Clement took to his Twitter account to joust with several people, including journalist Andrew Coyne and economist Stephen Gordon (who had been intensely critical of Clement’s decision to discontinue the mandatory long-form census).

Clement puts on the gloves Twitter-style

The exchange lasted about two hours and ended at about midnight. I think it’s remarkable (in a good way) that Clement is doing this. But it makes me wonder about a couple of things. The Stephen Harper government has been painted as exceedingly locked-down in terms of communication, and there has been a long history of clashes between journalists and the government. But here’s a senior cabinet minister slugging it out with a journalist and others in the public twitterverse.

So I tip my hat to Minister Clement. I think it’s great that he’s doing this. And now, some tips that I think his tweeting can teach us all:

1. Use the tool that you are comfortable with. It could be argued that a blog might be a better tool for Clement. But for whatever reason or reasons, Clement likes Twitter. So he’s using Twitter. You can’t force a minister to do stuff. But I don’t think anyone’s twisting Clement’s arm to do this. He’s engaged. So work with that.
2. Don’t cut and run when things get tough. Clement has gone through some bruiser battles on Twitter. But he’s still there, and while he may end a given exchange, he doesn’t go to ground when critics appear. You have to brace yourself for the critics and be ready to respond.
3. Remember that you control your message, no matter the medium. In the exchange from last night, Andrew Coyne presses hard for Clement to disclose departmental research. Note that Clement doesn’t say “no.” He ignores the request. He could provide it at a later time, or he might not. Or Coyne could do an Access to Information request to obtain the research.
4. Choose a medium you can communicate in. Clement appears to be a tech savvy guy; he also appears to like cut and thrust. That makes Twitter useful for him. Furthermore, he uses the shorthand and conventions of the medium to his own advantage. He shortens words, uses hashtags, etc.
5. Choose a medium that matches your urgency and frequency needs. I mentioned in tip 1 that a blog might be better for Clement in terms of putting out fleshed-out arguments. But the conversationality wouldn’t be there, and the need to polish the writing would be higher. A podcast would require some sort of equipment (even Audioboo would require a mobile device), and it doesn’t have the immediacy of a tweet.

I hope these tips are useful. If you have any more to add, please leave them in the comments.

UPDATE: The 92nd Street Y has apologized to Martin and Solomon, and posted the apology on its blog. Here it is:

We know there have been a lot of stories in the media over the last couple of days about our evening at 92Y with Deborah Solomon and Steve Martin and our decision to offer gift certificates to our audience.

We realize now that offering a refund, especially without consulting with our guests who graciously gave of their time, was disrespectful.  We have learned our lesson, and this will not happen again.

For what it’s worth, this is good apologizing. It’s specific, it doesn’t weasel, and it’s not too long. Well done on that front.

END UPDATE

I’m watching with train-wreck fascination as New York’s 92nd Street Y seems to tick off every party involved in a recent event.

For those not in the know, the 92nd Street Y, or 92Y, is not a Y like we Ottawa folk might envision, with a small pool and a weight room and an aerobics studio and a couple of change rooms. Like most things in New York, it’s a LOT bigger. It’s got annual revenues approaching $100 million. Their speakers list includes names like Salman Rushdie, Carol Bartz, Tony Blair, Dan Rather… It’s a giant-sized cultural centre, performance space, and a health centre TOO.

So. One recent event at 92Y was a public conversation between Steve Martin and New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Soloman, held November 29. Soloman does Q&A interviews for the Times, and is a frequent target of satirical website Gawker for her style.

The conversation, held in front of 900 people who paid $50 a head to attend, apparently went off the rails. How badly? It’s hard to judge, since there’s no video available (yet), but  badly enough that an organizer brought out a note to Soloman halfway through. One twitterer (The COO of Newsweek, not that that matters for this purpose) wrote:

Incredible sight: interview w/ witty & charming @SteveMartinToGo botched by boorish & blundering NYT writer @92Y. Audience almost hissing.

The note asked Soloman to move the conversation away from art (the subject of Martin’s novel An Object of Beauty) and towards his movie and entertainment career. Neither was happy, apparently, and likely a bit embarrassed. Especially when Soloman read out the note and the audience cheered.

And the Y folks apparently weren’t happy to boot. The executive director of 92Y sent an e-mail to ticketholders the next day, saying (according to reports): “We acknowledge that last night’s event with Steve Martin did not meet the standard of excellence that you have come to expect from 92nd St. Y.  We planned for a more comprehensive discussion and we, too, were disappointed with the evening. We will be mailing you a $50 certificate for each ticket you purchased to last night’s event. The gift certificate can be used toward future 92Y events, pending availability.”

That move displeased both Soloman and Martin. Martin tweeted:

So the 92nd St. Y has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in real time by its audience’s emails. Artists beware.

When twitterer @Brilliantbooks noted to Martin that “Y billed it an evening with a star. Not a talk about art” he responded “Then they lied to the audience. They knew what it was.” He’s since moved on to making jokes about interrupting sex with his wife with “book chat” and her demanding a refund.

And like most things in the fishbowl of celebrity and New York, it’s a media story. To my mind, it’s the biggest interview-fiasco story since the 2008 Lacy-Zuckerberg kerfuffle (credit to Holtz and Hobson)

So what’s to be learned here?

• Know what you’re getting before you go public. Martin says 92Y knew what they were going to get. And it was he, not the Y, who asked Deborah Soloman to be his conversational partner. Yet the Y billed the event as: “Steve Martin with Deborah Soloman. Steve Martin is a celebrated writer, actor and performer. His film credits include Father of the Bride, Parenthood and The Spanish Prisoner, as well as Roxanne, L.A. Story and Bowfinger, for which he also wrote the screenplays. He’s won Emmy Awards for his television writing and two Grammy Awards for comedy albums. In addition to a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, he has written a best-selling collection of comic pieces, Pure Drivel and a best-selling novella, Shopgirl. His most recent novel is An Object of Beauty: A Novel.” I have no idea whether the organizers knew what Soloman and Martin were planning to discuss. And I have no idea whether Martin saw the promo copy for the event. But there was a disconnect, and it hurt.
• When you’re in the middle of an event, don’t try to pull a 180. A number of years ago, I was at a “Newfie night” fundraising event for a church-related fundraising project at a church in Ottawa. The headliner for the evening was Greg Malone of CODCO fame. Malone came out and did some humour that was sharp-edged, dark, and a bit blue. Halfway through his routine, people started leaving. Then someone stood up and heckled him. And then an organizer came out and whispered in Malone’s ear. “I guess I’m done,” Malone said, and stalked offstage. It was, to put it bluntly, a disaster. Would it have been worse to let Malone finish? Was the best course of action for the Y to have sent out the note? Ummm, no. In a Stephen King novel, a character says “done-bun-can’t-be-undone.”
• Be careful with your apologies. I’m not convinced the refund was the way to go. I’ve been to some stinko plays in my time; I’ve attended boring readings. But how bad does something have to be to offer a refund? Again, it’s hard to know how bad THIS was without having attended live or via satellite, but jeez. Was it THAT bad?

So now the 92nd Street Y has a disappointed audience and offended presenters, one of whom has 399,000 Twitter followers. Let’s go over the lessons for event organizers once again:

• Make sure EVERYONE involved in an event knows what the event is.
• Even if it goes off the rails, it’s almost always too late to try and pull it back onto the rails in the middle. You have to rely on the people on stage.
• If it has gone wrong, be very careful how you make amends.

As if we didn’t need proof that media training is an ongoing need from Rob Ford’s interview with As it Happens.

Check out how Stephen Duckett, Alberta’s top health-care bureaucrat deals with media:

That’s 134 seconds of pain that could have been avoided by a little less flippancy and a little more diplomacy.

Mitigating this: a full and clear apology and acknowledgement that he muffed it. Good on him for that.

UPDATED: Monday, November 22: The leader of Alberta’s Opposition Liberal party is calling for Duckett’s resignation. Meanwhile, a government backbencher has been expelled from caucus over a rather intemperate e-mail he sent quite broadly last week. Seems like a high-pressure time in Alberta’s health sector.

I had a coffee with Vincent White of Canada NewsWire today, the first time we’d had a chance to chat in person. He’s a recent transplant to Ottawa from his home town of Montreal. As we chatted about a number of things, with a special appearance from PR and Other Deadly Sins cohort Mark Blevis, an idea came up.

I had also met today with Kel Morin-Parsons for the first time, and while we were getting to know each other, I was able to introduce her to Kym, who photographed me earlier this year. What do Mark, Kym, and Kel have in common? Multiple lives. Not the reincarnated type.

Kel works with a national association. She works with other smart communicators. She writes academic papers. She acts, writes, and directs. She has her own theatre company.

How an "amateur" can make a silk purse of a sow's ear

Kym is a public servant. She is a travel addict. And she’s created a web site where she takes pictures of people (quite artfully making them look fantastic and catching a sense of who they are seemingly effortlessly, from the subject’s point of view.)

Mark is a public affairs professional, a podcaster, a musician, a conference organizer…

It occurred to me that these folks are far from unique in my life. Ryan works with Kel, and is a blogger. Kym has taken photos of Emily, who is a graphic designer, a t-shirt entrepreneur, and a fundraiser against cancer with her art. Rob is a singer, a revitalizer of community associations, a public servant, and the organizer of a great fundraiser. Andrea is a singer-songwriter whose work I love and who does media monitoring in the early mornings. Suze is a maker of videos, a teacher, and helped create a super web site with Cheryl, who is a videotape editor, an organizer of songwriting circles, and more. And I have this job as a public relations guy, in addition to helping to organize meetups, serving on a board, doing house concerts, podcasting about Stephen King, trying to write a novel…

This isn’t the way my parents lived. Not sure it was the way ANYone’s parents lived. As Vincent and I talked about that, he wondered if this was an Ottawa thing. One of the things he’s noticed in his time here is that this is a “community” thing that may be unique to Ottawa. (He also pointed out that when we Ottawa types go to a 5 à 7, we leave at 7 and go home, instead of heading to a restaurant and continuing the evening. That is a Montréal thing, along with the best smoked meat and Sicilian cannoli…)

So I’m asking you: is this an Ottawa thing? Are we doing this more than other people? Or is this the way we all live now?

Happy weekend, everyone.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who’s working in a role more focused on outreach than he’s used to. He called me to ask about webinars. “Are they social media?” I started to think about that and delivered a fairly equivocal answer — yeah, webinars can be, but they aren’t necessarily, depends on the interaction, blah de blah de blah.

But then I had a little epiphany. Something — a tactic — isn’t “social media.” The STRATEGY is social media. The tactic is just the action of the strategy.

It’s not the webinar that is or isn’t social. It’s the thinking behind it. If the thinking is: “we will deliver information to you and you will listen,” the tactics aren’t social. If the thinking is, “we want to tell you what we’re doing, and then we want you to tell us what you think, then we’ll react…” the tactics are social.

Of course, where does this insight end? It ends at the listener. Because if the RECIPIENT of this messaging wants to take it and run with it, he or she will, and your strategy be damned.

Look at what just happened with Air Canada and the wheelchair incident. Air Canada likely believed that its dealings with the family of Tanner Bawn were private. If you’re not aware, just Google “Tanner Bawn” and “wheelchair.” But their belief was not shared by the family, who were well-versed in the social media world and already had followers and friends online. And Air Canada appear to have been totally insulated from the firestorm of criticism that was growing online.

So what did I learn from my friend’s question? I learned to extend one of my favorite sayings from Terry Fallis — “a tactic is not a strategy” to “it’s not the tactic that’s social — it’s the strategy.”

I had a quick chat with Robert Janelle yesterday, who was writing an article for the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce‘s member newsletter about social media for business.

One of the things I talked about was learning from others, and building on their ideas. In folk music, that’s “the folk tradition.” But given that you can’t copyright an idea or a concept, there’s no reason that businesses embarking on a social media initiative — or any sort of communications, for that matter — shouldn’t learn from others.

And case studies can be a powerful way of doing just that. Conveniently enough, there are good people who are compiling lists of case studies online. Some of these lists are in wiki form, so you can easily add your own; others are more conventional sites. Either way, use them. Why not save yourself making the same mistakes others made, and find brand new mistakes to make! As Samuel Beckett so famously put it: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Here are some places to find useful case studies in social media:

Penn Olson’s 30 social media case studies

Web 2.0 examples in Canada wiki

Peter Kim’s list of over 1000 social media “examples” (the inspiration for Web 2.0 examples in Canada)

Tod Maffin‘s Case Studies Online site

UPDATE: If you prefer your case studies in the live and in person format, and you’re in Ottawa, you should check out Case Study Jam, a little meetup that I’ve been helping to organize with a cast of ones, including Joe Boughner, Amy Boughner, Melanie Bechard, Della Siemens, and Nick Charney. You can get a sense of what a CSJ is like from Robin Browne’s handy-dandy audio playlist!

And one more thing to think about: If you have an example of how your company or a client did something interesting, why not write something up about it and submit it to one of these lists? Sharing is caring.

Photo credit: The Cake Engineer on Flickr, licenced via Creative Commons

I’m doing some work on the music side of the world these days. So I get to not only geek out about music recreationally, but professionally! Whee.

So when I, a longtime Rush fan, heard a cover of Subdivisions on CBC Radio’s Fresh Air recently, it caught my ear. My first stop was Google, of course, and I found this:

This is a guy named Jacob Moon, and with two guitars, a looping pedal, and a pocket audio recorder, created a pretty darn credible cover of a song I never would have thought of for a solo artist.

So why write about him here? Because of what this video did for him. So Moon is a Hamilton-based singer-songwriter who has put out seven CDs (or albums for those of my generation). But I’m not ashamed to say I had never heard of him. There’s a world of people out there, and it’s hard to get noticed.

But when Moon covered “Subdivisions”, then recorded the video on that photogenic rooftop, it made its way to Rush themselves. I think you can guess that they didn’t explode with outrage. Here’s what Neil Peart told the Toronto Sun about the song.

“We all shared Jacob Moon’s performance of Subdivisions quite a long time ago and sent it to each other, ‘Hey have you seen this?’ because it’s such a beautiful cover. The imaginative way that he uses the little cassette player to get my voice in there. It’s superb. And it is that kind of song. It’s a singer-songwriter’s song. I loved to see his version of it and I loved the idea that song has endured to his generation.”

So not only did they like it. But they asked him to be one of the three artists asked to cover Rush songs at the Canadian Songwriters’ Hall of Fame gala in Toronto.

So Jacob Moon has scored a giant coup. Because of his good work, he’s likely gotten the biggest press he’s ever gotten. But the questions are:

• What are the opportunities?
• What are the risks?
• And how does Jacob maximize the one and minimize the other?

The quick answers, for me, are:

There are HUGE opportunities — at least in the world of solo singer-songwriter acts. Moon has a quite solid web site, which he’s using to great effect. And he’s continuing to get gigs supporting more established and famous singer-songwriters like Melissa McLelland and David Wilcox (the american one).

To me there are two big risks: first, that he gets stereotyped as the “rush cover guy”; second, that the inevitable dropoff of attention now that the gala’s over and fades from recent memory will demotivate him. I think the first risk can be counteracted by getting something very NON-Subdivisions into circulation. IT won’t / can’t have the same impact, but it will be the best chance of non-American-Pieing himself (I always believe that hell for me would be to be reborn as Don McLean and have to sing that song EVERY night FOREVER).

The second risk is a tougher one, I think. Musicians live in an odd universe where they perform in front of (but apart from) crowds, but the hard part of the job is done alone, in a room, with a keyboard or a fretboard, and there’s nobody to prop you up. So it’s going to be important for him to manage his goals and his expectations for his music.

In the meantime, here’s my lessons:

• When serendipity strikes, RIDE that sucker like a horse heading for the finish line.
• Sometimes nice guys do get a break.
• Don’t assume that the peak is the new normal.

Just not in that way. This, however, is a masterpiece of blog-history: random notes on blogging

Well done. Can I get a free cartoon now?

Ciao,
Bob